


you're the only one of you

by sumaru



Series: this is a state of grace [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop & Tattoo Parlor, Cannibalism, Canon Crossover, Character Death, Final Haikyuu Quest, Happy Ending, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Selfcest, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 23:00:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18679066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sumaru/pseuds/sumaru
Summary: Spring is especially delicious in this world.(The demon king is determined to bloom again.)





	you're the only one of you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Magepaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magepaw/gifts).



> HAPPY DEADBIRDMAS ENJOY YOUR MESS I REALLY DID KILL A BIRD FOR YOU HUH

 

 

 

_The green path finally splits:_

_> Go left._  
_> Go right._

_(You’ve always led with your strongest hand.)_

 

 

*

 

 

“And _aster tataricus_ for remembrance—”

“Big words, Iwa-chan! Very impressive! Did they teach you that at flower school?” Oikawa leans his elbows on the florist’s counter as Iwaizumi tucks one last flower into a customer’s order. A flush of pale purple ink spills wild daisies across the bulge of Oikawa’s bicep, crowding out the ivy and thorns tangling up from his wrist; the new tattoo is barely a week old. Spring was especially delicious here, and Oikawa had been determined to bloom again. 

“Don’t you have your own store to mind?” Iwaizumi scowls as he slowly wraps the bouquet in translucent paper. An extra bit of adhesive tape sticks to his fingers. “Shittykawa,” he adds for good measure as he reaches out and smoothly thumbs it off onto Oikawa’s cheek.

An indignant squawk as Oikawa slaps at Iwaizumi’s hands. “This poor treatment! After I made your bento with _love!_ ”

“You cut a piece of nori into a heart and put it on top of plain rice. I watched you do it in our kitchen this morning. It took you at most thirty seconds.” Iwaizumi’s hands haven’t moved from Oikawa’s cheeks, resting feather-light on the skin, as if once touched he can’t bear to let go again. “Maybe sixty seconds, actually. You’re very slow and stupid in the mornings, you know.”

“With _so much_ love _,_ ” Oikawa whines in protest.

“And I’ll eat all of it with love,” Iwaizumi grins broadly, a smile familiar and unfamiliar all at once, and Oikawa’s heart swells like a river in spring.

 

 

*

 

 

_Demon shadows surge into the golden corners of the shrine, peeling back its silence, a black fire that strips bark from wood. Your bow is broken. The air smells of burning meat and your stomach churns. You don’t think you could ever eat a pork bun again. Do you:_

_> Grab the leaf-green amulet and run. _  
_> Pull the foxstone from the altar before it cracks. _  
_> ????_

_(You've never run away from anything in your whole young life.)_

 

 

*

 

 

“You piece of shit,” the fox snarls. Its golden fur is mired by soot and gore. “You dare eat my heart, so don’t start fucking crying when I eat yours in return!”

The demon king picks a particularly determined bit of artery out from between his teeth with the tip of a silver arrow. 

“Ugh, can you be any more _boring?_ ”

And the summer trees burn down to dust around them.

 

 

*

 

 

Once upon a time, when they were still so young and free, Tooru had held his breath for a whole three minutes and twenty-six seconds after Hajime had scoffed and said no, he doesn’t want to weave stupid flowers in between the stubby little spires of Tooru’s white horns. Shouting didn’t work, slapping didn’t work, even throwing handful after handful of green grass at him didn’t work, Tooru had always been stubborn like that, and it was only when he had started to grow alarmingly red in the face that Hajime gave in.

 _Hide them, hide them,_ Tooru pouts, childish tears prickling the corners of his eyes.

 _Anemone so you’ll learn sincerity_ , _lots of azalea for your stupid impatient brain,_ Hajime recites in monotone from their lessons as Tooru sniffles in indignation. _One single violet so maybe one day your heart will care about something other than yourself._

_I care about a lot of things! I care about everything!_

_Uh-huh._

The flower crown is lopsided, petals wilting to one side — Hajime never said he was any good at this, but he eyes his work critically anyway, mouth pinched tight in concentration as he carefully weaves a pale purple daisy through the soft waves of Tooru’s hair, letting the petals flop over the horn still left uncovered. The old texts never mentioned flower crowns as part of a knight’s fealty. But then, they never mentioned a prince with a smile this bright and horns that gleamed so white they could outshine the summer sun. 

There was still so much that Hajime had to learn. But everything feels possible with Tooru at his side.

_Why do you remember all the names, Iwa-chan? You always say the Old Fox’s lessons are boring!_

_(So I won’t forget you.)_

But Hajime doesn’t say it out loud. He had felt the horns growing against his hand, as if already yearning for something they could never have.

 

 

*

 

 

“If you’ve hurt him, I’ll—”

“What makes you think I would ever hurt Iwa-chan?” The demon king’s eyes flash in the low light as he breathes in the threat tumbling from Oikawa’s lips. Such sweet, sweet spring. A new pale purple flower blooms along the inside of the demon king’s arm. “What do you know of anything at all?”

Oikawa is sitting hostage in a chair in the back of his tattoo studio. The stranger with his face had appeared a week ago and it had been a black nightmare of time unmoving ever since. He only knows it’s been a week because of the sun shadows creeping under the door; he is terrifyingly powerless here. The one time he had tried to fight back, it was like his fists had the power of a butterfly landing. Not so much as a flinch. 

Except for one thing.

“I’ll give you the time Iwa-chan got hideously drunk and dropped the cake at my twenty-first birthday.” The cake had fallen into Oikawa’s lap — a completely ridiculous mess to end an otherwise completely ordinary night as Iwaizumi had tried, and failed, to drunkenly scoop up the goopy icing with his bare hands. Oikawa was only two beers in, so he had been the first one to realise, one long thunderclap of a heartbeat right before Iwaizumi did, then and there, with Iwaizumi’s sticky hands pawing stupidly at his jeans, what the two of them truly meant to each other.

The demon king smiles. It’s painted sharp white with moonlight. “Then I will give you the way the fox screamed when I stripped the little archer prince of his crown.”

 _Foxes can smell the memories on you_ , the demon king had explained the first night. _They can hunt the scent of your first kiss or your first kill through even dreams and realities. But they won’t catch me here so easily. I don't mean to ever go back there._

Memory for memory. A gentleness to open the door; a terror that sharpens the knife.

Oikawa has had nothing but time in here to pick it all apart, carefully weighing the strangeness of it all against the things he knew intimately — afterall, who better to know what crawls under your own skin than your own self? And he’s had plenty of years to look at all the ugliness inside him. Had years to look into the mirror and see where he needed to carefully patch things over.

This either works, or it doesn’t, and the thought of losing the memory of how Iwaizumi had grinned up at him, leaf-green eyes suddenly shy and knowing, a streak of pale purple icing smeared across his cheek, is almost enough to kill him.

He closes his eyes.

The demon king’s mouth is burning hot against Oikawa’s own, and behind the black spots wheeling like starlight behind his lids, it feels like falling through the dark of space. Kissing your reflection in the mirror should be cold, but the hands smoothly stripping the shirt from him boils something terrible in his gut. Fingers like brands striking each time they touch one of the flower tattoos his apprentice Tobio-chan had helped him grow along the full length of his arms. There’s a bloom for all the things he did right — blush roses, pale daisies, a single bluebell for the day he breathed deep and finally let it go. Memories, his and not his and yet his now anyway, whirl like dust in a trap and Oikawa somehow knows with the intensity of the demon king’s skin burning a fever into the hollow of his chest, that the rose gently budding in a nest of spring green leaves on the inside of his elbow will be gone when he opens his eyes next. So Oikawa doesn’t. He squeezes them tighter, lets the demon king settle like a stone in his lap and taste his tongue.

The demon king has a mole in the dip of his collarbone, just like him. It tastes of pure blue skies.

The demon king twists insistently when fingers grab the hard curve of his hip, just like him. It tastes of a gold so heavy it dips the head low.

The demon king bites back the moans spilling from his mouth when _It’s always only been you_ is breathed against the shell of his ear, just like him, and Oikawa’s skin feels tight and hot with the hate of it as he finally looks into that face, _his face_ , brown eyes wide, mouth soft and open and wondrous, and knows this was what his Iwa-chan had seen that day, the first year in their shared apartment, the first year when he took back the white throne, and Oikawa tastes a young archer prince too stupid to know when to quit, tastes the sweet fear as a leaf-green heart hits the flagstones of the shrine and cracks from side to side.

“You gambled and you lost, didn’t you. You lost him,” Oikawa hisses. It’s him, it’s him that cracks from side to side. _You lost your Iwa-chan._

Memories on memories on memories. Another flower inked into his skin fades, bartered away. The demon king looks tender and defenceless in Oikawa’s lap, and Oikawa soon finds out that he is just as tender and defenceless as Oikawa thought he would be. Or maybe Oikawa was the one tender and defenceless this entire time.

The demon king is hot and wet and whimpers like a wounded fox.

All those years eating sweet milk bread really does do something to your body, huh? Oikawa never liked eating things that were bitter.

 

 

*

 

 

_Is this what he wanted:_

_> No._  
_> No._

_(You can smell the sweet rot under the daisies. You continue to follow the green path that he left to you, hoping to one day meet again so you can curse him out for being a stupid, naive goody-two-shoes.)_

 

 

*

 

 

“Roses, Iwa-chan? Why, I never thought you for a romantic!”

There’s a new spring rose unfurling timidly in the crook of Oikawa’s elbow. It has always been there. It was never there before. He can feel Iwaizumi staring at it as he strips thorns from a morning delivery of red roses, thoughts clouded behind a thinking scowl. Iwaizumi has so many of them. Oikawa has had plenty of years to learn how to read every single one and now he’ll have plenty more.

“You want roses, you buy them yourself.”

“Hmph! What’s the point of dating a florist if he doesn’t shower you with flowers?”

“Wasn’t it just yesterday you were going on and on about how you only wanted me for my body? I can’t believe I’m dating such a flake.” But Iwaizumi is smiling. There are twenty-six red roses laid out on the counter, bare and defenceless. Oikawa is twenty-six years old in this world. He doesn’t know what pale purple icing eaten off of Iwaizumi’s clumsy fingers tastes like but the crown of his head is smooth here. Just brown hair. Just their tiny shared apartment with its light blue walls that have never been white at all.

Hands on hips. “Iwa-chan dares—”

“But you’re _my_ flake.” Iwaizumi suddenly flushes pink, looking out-of-sorts. His hands arrange and rearrange the same roses into piles of two and three. “You know that, right? I know sometimes you need to hear it. But it’s always only been—”

“—it’s always only been you.” Oikawa’s chest pinches. He feels like crying. Let them come. Let them shoot him full of their stupid arrows. Let them think their claws could ever tear him apart. He’ll keep eating every single memory until there’s nothing left of the summer trees and a lonely white throne; only the wide, unsullied future with his Iwa-chan by his side, green seedlings growing anew from black and bitter ash.

“Hey Oikawa, you want to do this forever?” Twenty-six roses are gathered in the ring of Iwaizumi’s strong, steady hands. Safe there even without their thorns. Iwaizumi looks like he’s about to cry, too. “All of this? With me?”

Oikawa already knows what his new tattoo will be — a leaf-green sprig unfurling to meet the sweet spring sun.

Everything he ever did right.

“I do, Iwaizumi Hajime.” Oikawa’s heart is a river overflowing its banks. “There’s nothing I want more than to keep making memories with you forever.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This... probably makes more sense if you read the first part.
> 
> [I promise that you'll never find another like me.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuXNumBwDOM)


End file.
